The present invention relates to communication systems, and more particularly to multiple-input multiple-output wireless systems.
Wireless communication systems typically use band-limited channels with time-varying (unknown) distortion and may have multi-users (such as multiple cellphone users within a cell). This leads to intersymbol interference and multi-user interference, and requires interference-resistant detection for systems which are interference limited. Interference-limited systems include multi-antenna systems with multi-stream or space-time coding which have spatial interference, multi-tone systems, TDMA systems having frequency selective channels with long impulse responses leading to intersymbol interference, CDMA systems with multi-user interference arising from loss of orthogonality of spreading codes, high data rate CDMA which in addition to multi-user interference also has intersymbol interference.
Interference-resistant detectors commonly invoke one of three types of equalization to combat the interference: maximum likelihood sequence estimation, (adaptive) linear filtering, and decision-feedback equalization. However, maximum likelihood sequence estimation has problems including impractically large computation complexity for systems with multiple transmit antennas and multiple receive antennas. Linear filtering equalization, such as linear zero-forcing and linear minimum square error equalization, has low computational complexity but has relatively poor performance due to excessive noise enhancement. And decision-feedback (iterative) detectors, such as iterative zero-forcing and iterative minimum mean square error, have moderate computational complexity but only moderate performance.
Thus there is a problem of trade-off of performance and computational complexity for multiple-input, multiple-output systems.